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When you start to consider email as a means of marketing and reaching new prospects as well as strengthening the relationship you have with existing customers it is important to keep in mind some very important rules. Here are some of the critical things that you should consider when you begin, supplied by Recorded Devilery who have a one stop solution for email marketing.

1. Only send emails to people who have requested to receive them or to those who you have an existing relationship with. These might be prospects to whom you have sent information to or spoken to on the telephone or they may be existing customers or colleagues. The key is that they must know who you are and why you have contacted them.

2. Take every opportunity to build up your email list with valuable contacts, when someone makes an enquiry by telephone or in person, ask politely if you can add them to your list. Make sure members of your staff who come into contact with potential and existing customers get into the habit of asking for email addresses. Sign up forms on your website, feedback forms and competitions are other good ways of building your list.

3. Only include content which is relevant to the people you are sending to or to the product or service you are offering. The content should be benefiting the recipient of your emails in some way, either by making them aware of something to their advantage or telling them something of interest.

4. When you send your welcome email or perhaps even on your thank you page it is important to include a message like: “To ensure receipt of our emails, please add yourname@yourcompany.com to your Address Book.” This address will be the “from” email you are using and will improve your delivery rate by avoiding messages be directed into junk mail folders. It’s good practice to add this into your emails to make sure that your recipients are reminded to do it. By being added to their safe senders it will also mean that images are displayed in your emails.

5. Make the From Name for your messages either your company name or the name of a person at your company. Once you choose a From Name, keep it consistent. This will help people to recognise that this is a valid email as they quickly scan through their inbox.

6. If you are sending nicely formatted and illustrated HTML emails, make sure you also have a plain text version for those who can’t or don’t want to receive the full HTML version. With increasing numbers of people receiving emails on their mobiles a text only version may be more appealing to them.

7. Send emails at regular intervals if possible and not more often than is appropriate. If your emails have good quality content that the recipients find interesting and useful, they will look forward to your nest email and read it.

8. Timing can be important; in general it seems to be best to send business emails between Tuesday and Thursday and either just after the start of the day or just after lunch. For business emails, late afternoon or just before people leave the office is not such a good idea.

9. If your emails are going to consumers, then early evening may be a good time or perhaps on Fridays if you offer something which they might buy on the internet at the weekend. Much of the timing of your emails will depend on who your target is and their particular habits, but it’s important to consider this when you schedule your email sending.

10. Using lots of upper case text or exclamation marks within the subject line or body of your emails is a good way to aggravate spam filters and will result in your emails either being deleted or sent straight to a junk email folder.

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